A riveting novel exploring murder, perfidy, and love.
In Hill’s dark thriller, a troubled teenaged girl murders her serially unfaithful boyfriend and wrestles with the psychological fallout of her crime.
In 1969 England, Carol Cage is only 15 years old, still reeling from the sudden death of the father she adored and losing herself in the books he bequeathed her. When she meets Frankie Dewberry, a 19-year-old “posh boy from London” who hails from a wealthy family that inhabits the “borders of royalty,” she is immediately taken in by his flirtatious charms. They begin a relationship, and Carol falls deeply in love with him, but Frankie is a relentless womanizer, committed to pursuing sexual conquests and equally intent upon lying about them. Ultimately, Carol becomes pregnant with his child, Francine, and as a result his wealthy aunt, Thora Kent, makes financial provisions for Carol and her forthcoming child—but cuts out Frankie due to his delinquency. For all of his charm, Frankie is morally wayward and a shiftless, irresponsible young man who seems permanently allergic to maturity. In this atmospherically haunting tale, Carol, traumatized by Frankie’s betrayals, murders him with the help of a neighbor named Perry Cutler—he has his own lurid interests in the crime. The pair buries Frankie in an apple orchard. Decades later, Carol, beleaguered by mental instability, reflects on her transgressions and what they reveal about her character; her chillingly unhinged introspection is artfully conveyed by the author in powerfully spare prose. (“I’m not a killer. I’m someone who makes bad choices.”) In the aftermath of Frankie’s death, Carol pivots toward Perry, engaging in a peculiar social arrangement that perversely pantomimes marriage—he is her “guardian and [her] jailor.”
At the heart of the plot is Carol’s psychological state—she is by turns precociously bright and emotionally volatile, and the pendulum swings of her affect are as fascinating as they are discomfiting. Hill exercises an impressive authorial restraint, only slowly revealing the volatility at the heart of Carol’s fragile psyche. What often appears to be her fortitude—she can be uncommonly brave and assertive—can just as easily be interpreted as psychological dysfunction. She is a remarkably complex heroine, at times thoroughly sympathetic and at other times morally grotesque. She is in most respects an ordinary girl, but the premature death of her father, and her mother’s emotional distance, have damaged her in a way that is both obvious and challenging to fully articulate (after all, a certain measure of emotional inconstancy is a perfectly natural feature of adolescence). The novel as a whole is grippingly unpredictable—Carol acts as an unreliable narrator in the story, and the reader will likely be unprepared for some extraordinary twists at the book’s conclusion. Hill has composed a suspenseful narrative, and a grimly insightful one as well, that is both intelligently composed and dramatically mesmerizing. This is a macabre and melancholic tale, but not a hopeless one; the reader is left with a sliver of a promise of redemption. A riveting novel exploring murder, perfidy, and love.Pub Date: April 27, 2019
ISBN: 9781093123739
Page Count: 310
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Gleefully sadistic, gloriously gratifying revenge fiction.
A frustrated advice columnist takes matters into her own hands.
Before dropping out of MIT during the second semester of her sophomore year, Debbie Mullen had designs on becoming the next Bill Gates. Now, almost 30 years later, the stay-at-home wife and mother of two uses her considerable genius to keep the Mullens’ Hingham, Massachusetts, household functioning “like a well-oiled machine.” In her spare time, Debbie also gardens and shares “the fruits of [her] wisdom” with neighbors via the weekly advice column she writes for Hingham Household, a local “family-oriented” newspaper. Though Debbie is proud of her husband and teen daughters’ accomplishments, her own life sometimes feels a bit empty. As such, she’s both honored and excited when Home Gardening magazine selects her backyard to feature in their next issue. Then, at the last minute, the publication decides to go in a different direction and instead spotlights the roses of her arch rival. Later that day, the editor-in-chief of Hingham Household axes her column because she’d counseled a reader to get a divorce. That evening, Debbie learns that her hard-working husband’s miserly boss refused his promotion request, her brilliant older daughter’s sketchy boyfriend broke her heart, and her athletically gifted younger daughter’s chauvinistic coach cut her from the soccer team for being “chubby.” Enough is enough. Debbie has always given great advice—everybody says so. If certain individuals don’t know what’s best for themselves, maybe it’s her obligation to help them see the light. Increasingly unhinged entries from a “Dear Debbie” drafts folder pepper the briskly paced, meticulously crafted tale, which unfolds courtesy of a pinwheeling first-person narrative. Some of the plot’s myriad twists are more impressive than others, but plucky, puckish Debbie is a nontraditional antihero for the ages.
Gleefully sadistic, gloriously gratifying revenge fiction.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249624
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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